The electronics market offers a wide variety of digital devices having different image capture and display capabilities. Parameters selected to optimize image capture for one device may produce an image which is not optimized for display on another device. Even if an image capture system attempts to anticipate this disparity, the wide variation in lighting conditions in different environments can make it intractable to optimize the image ex ante for a given display. In some circumstances, e.g., underwater imaging, it may simply not be possible to acquire an image with the available hardware and lighting conditions such that it will be optimally displayed on a user device. Even if a solution were identified, many applications, e.g., streaming video, require rapid and possibly real-time image enhancement. These demands make solutions, however effective, intractable if they cannot perform image enhancement quickly. Accordingly, there exists a need for quick and effective image optimization despite disparate lighting and image capture hardware conditions.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that the logic and process steps illustrated in the various flow diagrams discussed below may be altered in a variety of ways. For example, the order of the logic may be rearranged, substeps may be performed in parallel, illustrated logic may be omitted, other logic may be included, etc. One will recognize that certain steps may be consolidated into a single step and that actions represented by a single step may be alternatively represented as a collection of substeps. The figures are designed to make the disclosed concepts more comprehensible to a human reader. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that actual data structures used to store this information may differ from the figures and/or tables shown, in that they, for example, may be organized in a different manner; may contain more or less information than shown; may be compressed and/or encrypted; etc.